There are no boundaries uncrossed in the Northern Ireland Political Collection's fascinating exhibition
FILCHED FROM lamp-posts and ripped from walls, the posters currently on display at the Linen Hall Library in Belfast offer a powerful snapshot guide to the Troubles. There are no nuances here - the words and imagery are blunt, harsh, and in your face.
Examples vary: a pile of human skulls and the bleak legend "Remember Derry"; a carbonised corpse from the 1978 La Mon restaurant bombing with the slogan "this is what the bombers did to a human being"; a loyalist prisoner's head in silhouette, bowed before a watchtower, with the simple message "bring our prisoners home".
On show to mark the 40th anniversary of the Northern Ireland Political Collection (NIPC) at the library, these posters - representing every political persuasion - were the visual frontline of the conflict: designed to evoke gut reactions and to inspire ideological fervour, they are essentially an evolved form of street art, a step up from the gable-end scrawl.
As Danny Morrison, former Sinn Féin publicity director, noted, posters had "a crucial role and a function in mobilising" during the Troubles, carrying an unparalleled visceral force and impact.
If many of these images have all the subtlety of a smack in the eye, others have a distinct aesthetic appeal. Anarchist John McGuffin's 1969 poster of a red hand clenched in a fist, crushing Parliament Buildings to smithereens, with the slogan "Smash Stormont", was the first of the Troubles to call for the overthrow of the Unionist state - anticipating what became a familiar Republican demand. Ironically, the image has a curious delicacy; it was produced using a silkscreen printing technique that McGuffin learned in Paris in May 1968.
Other posters are simply bizarre: one Northern Ireland Office poster shows children's road-safety character Tufty incongruously toddling down a bombed-out street, with the message "don't play in empty buildings - they could be very dangerous".
While this extraordinary range of posters may be the most familiar outer face of the renowned Political Collection, true aficionados of the archive know that many more fascinating items lurk within. Begun in 1968, when the then librarian Jimmy Vitty decided to file away a civil-rights pamphlet he was handed in a bar, the collection now contains 300,000 documents, pamphlets and artefacts that provide a fantastically detailed insight into the Troubles. It numbers Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley among its avowed fans, not to mention Brad Pitt, who in 1995 popped in to read up on the hunger strikers. Countless researchers, politicians and academics have spent hours here, wading through the strange minutiae of the conflict.
Richard English, professor of politics at Queen's University Belfast, and author of Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA, describes it as "invaluable - utterly unique as a comprehensive archive of the Troubles. Nowhere else holds contemporary archive material from all sides - from the INLA to the LVF and everything in between." The scope of the collection is key to its appeal, agrees commentator Davy Adams: "The really impressive thing is the initiative to hang on to virtually everything".
Sinn Féin's Tom Hartley, Lord Mayor of Belfast, has been a friend to the collection for many years: "If there was a report, a poster, a leaflet or a pamphlet, I tried to get a copy to put in the collection. This stuff maps out our whole history: from civil rights to internment to the Anglo-Irish agreement and beyond."
CURIOSITIES OF THE collection include babies' propaganda bibs, emblazoned with "proud to be a Prod", a lollipop in the shape of a foot, with the inscribed invitation to "Kick the Pope", and a letter of support from the Ayatollah Khomeini to Bobby Sands. And, to mark the 40th anniversary, there are exhibits on display for the first time - a PSNI application pack, sent to Mr P O'Neill at 52 Falls Road (the address of Sinn Féin's Belfast office), and a loyalist medal commemorating the "Siege of Drumcree" (closer inspection shows that the engravers mis-spelled it "seige"). One particularly striking item is the "comm", or prison letter, that ended the 1981 Hunger Strike: a flimsy document, covered in tiny script.
The library's independence has been a key factor in accumulating this store of peculiar treasure. Freedom from bureaucratic constraints, as well as what the NIPC librarian Yvonne Murphy calls a position of "engaged neutrality", has allowed the library a free hand in documenting the conflict. But it's easy to forget that collecting such controversial, seditious and sometimes illegal material could be quite a challenge.
One of the most fascinating items on display in the library is a signed note of authorisation from a British army general, dated 1977, giving permission for librarian "Miss Paula Howard" to "carry examples of political propaganda from Dublin to Belfast for the purposes of exhibition".
Contacts in the Unionist establishment helped the library acquire a special dispensation, allowing it to circumvent the Special Powers Act, which made the possession of pro-paramilitary publications a prosecutable offence. There was little surprise when the collection quickly became known as the "illegal deposits library".
As far as Dr Kris Brown, a researcher at the University of Ulster and former worker at the Political Collection, is concerned, it's the lesser-known ephemera that is the greatest strength of the archive. The political collection has preserved the material culture of the conflict, much of which, as Brown points out, was never designed to have any kind of shelf life. "News sheets, bulletins that were little more than two or four sheets stapled together - this intensely creative 'mosquito press' offers a micro-level documentary of the conflict. It seems so cheap and ephemeral, but it really is life under a lens."
Bleak humour, forceful propaganda, weird kitsch: the Political Collection holds a mirror up to Northern material culture in all its many moods.
• Troubled Imagesis at the Vertical Gallery, Linen Hall Library, Belfast until October 28th